Jeremy Fox

Noam Chomsky, aclamado por algunos como el «Einstein de la lingüística moderna», también es bien conocido como un disidente político no conformista y un agudo crítico de la sociedad contemporánea. Es

Scenes from Life is a collection of stories and vignette set in a variety of countries. They describe encounters with people and with the often strange worlds they and we inhabit. Some of those brushes are the stuff of adventure.Two involve the authors close encounters with death. There are tales of human kindness, but also of cruelty. One is a narrative told to the author by a survivor of the Holocaust. All accounts in the collection are true in that they are taken from life and are a record of memory and occasional field notes.As many truths exist as there are people to express them. They are ways of being in and seeing the world. Had someone else encountered the experiences and the characters that appear in this book, they would have written them differently, or perhaps not written them at all and either consigned them to capricious anecdote or to oblivion. So the sense in which these tales are true is necessarily the authors. They are offered to you, the reader in the hope that you will find in them some meaning of your own.As Thoreau observed: "Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts." We are alien first to ourselves.

Essays in Life is a selection of thirty-two pieces, all but nine of which, in earlier versions, have been previously published in on-line media. The range of subjects is wide - from Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, to politics, economics, immigration, social and political injustice, religion, democracy and freedom. In Memoriam - the concluding essay - is a personal account of friendship and loss.The authors aim in presenting these pieces is no different from that of the Spanish poet and essayist Juan Gil-Albert (1904 1994): "I write to clarify what I think, and offer these words in the hope that they may be of use to others."